HARARE – Exiled former Cabinet minister Professor Jonathan Moyo has moved to deny claims President Emmerson Mnangagwa had paid school fees for his children.

The claim was made by Jealousy Mawarire, the spokesperson for the National Patriotic Front which the former Higher Education Minister was involved in its founding.

“Sometimes people are better off quiet than expose their duplicitous selves. Who paid his children’s school fees when he moved to Kenya, wasn’t it ED?,” Mawarire said on Twitter Monday, reacting to Moyo’s statement in which he said he fell out with former First Lady Grace Mugabe over her plan to take over leadership of the fledgling party.

Prof Moyo, responding to another Twitter user who asked him to address the claims, said: “It’s shocking that you even consider it a possibility that the Gukurahundists who sent dozens of heavily armed soldiers to shoot to kill me and my family paid school fees for the same kids they wanted to kill in November. A macabre proposition. Try and find a believable CIO tale!”

Prof Moyo told ZimLive on Monday that what Mawarire may have been trying to allude to was the circumstances surrounding the release of money by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe to pay for school fees from their frozen bank accounts.

Following a military coup last November which ousted former President Robert Mugabe, nearly a dozen of his key loyalists skipped the border, among them Prof Moyo and former Local Government Minister Saviour Kasukuwere.

In turn, the government froze their bank accounts, including those of Prof Moyo’s Kenyan wife, Beatrice.

In January, according to Prof Moyo, he made a request for foreign currency through his bank in order to pay school fees for two of his daughters – one who was due to start university in South Africa and his 12-year-old daughter who goes to school outside Zimbabwe.

Prof Moyo said the banks informed them that their accounts had been frozen and referred them to Reserve Bank Governor John Mangudya.

“I recall Mangudya telling us after more than a month that he had sought authorisation from Mnangagwa to release funds to cover the school fees,” Prof Moyo said.

“They released $10,000 in my case to cover my youngest daughter and $20,000 for Kasukuwere. To this day, they have not authorised requests made in connection with my other daughter who was due to go to university, and who has been forced to defer her studies.”

Prof Moyo said their accounts had been unfrozen after nearly three months, he suspects “because they realised their actions were illegal.”

Meanwhile, the state-run Herald newspaper, quoting “a respected banker who knows how government transactions are done in the sector” claimed: “The G40 cabal wanted to externalise hundreds of thousands of US dollars to an African country (name supplied). The alert system picked that up and blocked that shady transaction.

“The shady transaction was going to be justified in the name of settling school fees for children, for which no proper receipts were tendered. It was only upon the production of valid receipts that the government authorised the banking sector to release monies that were needed for the educational expenses for children of members of the cabal, including the children of Jonathan Moyo.”